Scoring Your Audience and Why It Matters

First of all, what is scoring?  Scoring takes a matrix of your products and assigns each of them a weighted score.

For example:

• Print subscriber: 1 point
• Webinar attended: 5 points
• Webinar signup: 2 points
• Live event attendee: 10 points
• Opened email in last 1 month: 3 points

A scoring matrix adapts as your marketing focus changes and new products are added. The scoring logic also accounts for aging. It’s great if someone watched a webinar last month; not so great if they watched it 3 years ago.

Why Score Your Audience?

Good scoring becomes an efficient way to identify the most engaged audience members without pulling every product offered and email response data.

Sending an email effort to audience members with a high score is shown to increase the responsiveness of the campaign. High-scoring audience members are typically open to anything that comes from your brand.

If you’re thinking about doing surveys or setting up research panels, knowing high-scorers is a short cut to targeting the best group for success.

Understanding Low Scores

Analyzing data of low-scoring audience members is helpful, too: Seeing them as a group can help pinpoint gaps and problem areas. Sometimes your low scores are people who don’t fit the target audience. That’s understandable. Likewise, if a large number of people in target titles and industries are not engaging, it may be time to plan more outreach.

The biggest hurdle in scoring is accuracy. In order for a scoring matrix to work, print and digital products need to reside in a database along with email response data. If data exists in multiple silos or platforms, scores only cover a small segment and not across all of your points of engagement.

At SDM, we house all data in a single home, allowing for scoring across print, digital, webinars, and emails.